


from dust we come and from dust we return

by TheElusiveBadger



Series: a goat farm under the Wakandan sun [2]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant, Fix-It of Sorts, Goats, Jewish Bucky Barnes, Jewish Steve Rogers, M/M, Spoilers, Steve & Bucky Deserve Happiness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-02
Updated: 2018-05-02
Packaged: 2019-04-30 18:05:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14502570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheElusiveBadger/pseuds/TheElusiveBadger
Summary: *Spoilers for Infinity War*Bucky doesn't want to think about the cold and the dark of the soul stone. Nothing but loneliness, couldn't see another soul, and the thought of being trapped there for eternity—well, no use dwelling on it. He's alive now, and can't wait to get back to his hut, but there's just one thing wrong.And that's Steve.





	from dust we come and from dust we return

**Author's Note:**

> So, I have another part to this, which is now an unintentional series because I need to sue Marvel for the damage to my dissertation clearly. I can't concentrate. They have murdered me. Anyway, the previous one was very much not a fix-it fic, and it broke me to write it, so this one is a fix-it, because I know IW2 will murder me. All this will be Jossed. 
> 
> This isn't beta'd, so if there's anything wrong, just let me know!

“I think I remember a story like this,” Bucky quips as he continues to gaze at Steve’s back. The blonde’s shoulders stiffen, but he doesn’t turn around. From this angle, Bucky can see Steve’s bloodied knuckles reach out and push open the door of Bucky’s Wakandan hut, the bristles of his beard barely longer than when—well, no use thinking of _that_ , not right now—but anyway, they’re illuminated like a faint shadow in the moonlight, and the dirt and blood in his hair. “What was it called?”

Bucky’s tried to get caught up on all the modern literature, but occasionally things mix in his scrambled egg brain and he can’t quite pinpoint which tale is new, and which is old. Can’t quite remember the words he wants to say, because there’s so _many_ words that he can’t compartmentalize them. So, he leaves it hanging, waiting for Steve to answer, to say something.

_Anything._

“You lose your tongue or something?” Bucky asks, following Steve into the hut. The other man claps his hands and turns on the lights, calling attention to the displacement of his books on the floor, the dent in his fridge, and the empty trash. There’s a lingering scent of rot, and Bucky remembers the food he’d had, but he can’t see the remains. He doesn’t dwell on it, though, because hunger’s not returned to him, yet, and if Steve’s hungry the man can damn well go find food himself if he’s going to keep being _a silent, sullen schmuck_.

It’s unsettling, is what it is.

Bucky rubs a tired hand across his cheek. It’s lined with dirt and dust and blood, his hair stringy and clinging to his forehead. He smells like a Brooklyn dumpster in late July, he wants to crawl into his mattress that conforms to his body like a cloud (the one Steve complains he’s going to fall through), and sleep for a—

Sleep for eight hours. Like a normal fucking person.

He chooses to focus on the avalanche that appears to have hit his humble abode. “Were you contacting decorators? Getting shit appraised? Fuck, Rogers, some of these books are older than we are, and you’ve got them on the ground!”

He shucks out of the uniform he’s wearing that’s so damn uncomfortable now that they’re not in the heat of battle, letting it fall to the floor, and goes to pick up the books. Right before he picks up the first title, _Анна Каренина_ , Steve clears his throat and utters the first word he’s said since Bucky came out of the creepy as fuck, dark and cold, alien _soul stone_ , “Don’t.”

Bucky stops, frozen, one knee bent, his waist towards the floor, and rolls his eyes. “You’ve always been a messy punk.”

If he thinks _that’s_ going to get Rogers’ attention, he’s dead wrong. And Bucky’s been used to being dead wrong since ‘41, but he’s not used to being so wrong when it comes to _Steve_. He’d imagined a hug. Sam got a hug. That asshole Stark got a hug, and some kid in a spider costume that Bucky doesn’t even think Steve knows, and Wanda, too. They deserve hugs, Bucky’s not going to begrudge them comfort, if they went through the same experience (and the cold was worse the cryo, and the dark, his eyes were open, but he couldn’t see and couldn’t close them) but he’s known Steve since ‘28—’26? —and he deserves acknowledgment.

A low sound, a growl almost, which Bucky realizes after a split second is coming from him, echoes through the small living room with the dented fridge. “You better fix that,” he snaps, and then removes his pants and goes into his room to change his sweatpants. He pauses near the bed, with its rumpled sheets, and the covered mirror. There’s wax dripped and solidified on his windowsill, and three used candleholders covered by the white substance. He swallows, then trains his gaze to the bathroom where the shower door lays open and puts on sandals. Hands shaking, he rubs his face until its red from irritation and not blood and pulls his hair back into a bun. Little strands peak out at the nape of his neck.

He leaves the sheet and the candles. When he enters the living room, Steve’s moved, but barely. His hands are gripping the countertop near the sink with such intensity Bucky fears it will break off, and he’s staring out the window towards the tree line. His shoulders tremble, and Bucky wants to go over, remembering all the times he held Steve when he was small and sick, but he doesn’t. Outside, the goats bleat, and Bucky doesn’t know when the last time they were fed was if Steve’s been out fighting that purple alien Barney (fucking Rumlow for introducing the Winter Soldier to that shit), so he pads quietly across the floor and out to the pen.

There’s an achingly familiar redhead petting Ari, her knees bent so that she’s crouching, and she’s still wearing that form-fitting uniform that must be sweltering even at night. The fires left over from Thanos’ destruction left smoke in the air all over the outskirts of the main city, and drift over near Bucky’s patch of land. Punk bleats happily and trots over, hooves digging into the dirt as soon as Bucky rounds the corner into his sight. Benji doesn’t lift his head up from the trowel, and Bucky wonders if Natalia filled it.

 “They’re cute,” she tells him before he can muster up the strength to greet her as something other than _Spider_. He remembers holding the gun, the familiar weight against his shoulder, the trigger under his fingers, the calculations running through his brain. Seeing the bullet strike, go through, then a clean shot.

 He doesn’t ask if she’s scarred from it. He’s gotten good at that.

“They’re goats,” he replies, bending down, too, exact same pose, to rub Punk’s horns and head. “They’re supposed to be cute.”

 _Like cats,_ Bucky thinks, and remembers Becca’s love for that mangy stray Bucky found in an alley. Ariel, he believes, but it might have been Abraham? Ariel sounds better, Bucky decides, so he’ll go with that. _Like dogs, too, and hamsters and dolphins and turtles and babies and—_

 _Steve._ When he’s not being an ornery shit. Bucky lets out a few expletives in several languages, because it feels nice to let loose, takes him away from the machine HYDRA turned him into. Natasha smirks, her unflinching gaze trained on him, green eyes the same as that little girl in ballet shoes and that women on the dance floor in Kashmir and tells him that he should write a thesaurus of dirty terms if “you’re going to talk like a badly written rap song, Barnes.”

“I thought Steve would be attached to your hip,” she says, finally, after a long moment. Her eyes are calculating. “I figured he’d get a welder and make sure you never left his sight again.” The joke falls as flat as its meant to, the Black Widow not up to speed with the return of three billion people, a talking tree, and corpses to clean after a month of decay. 

Bucky rocks back onto his heels and looks to the edge of the mountains. Wonders if the kids are back there, playing and laughing, ready to come with flowers to weave into his hair tomorrow morning. “Yeah, well,” he starts to say, and doesn’t tell her, “so did I,” because he’s not sure what’s going on but it’s like Steve’s horrified he’s still here and doesn’t that sit like lead in his stomach. “Guess he’s tired,” Bucky lies, instead, and then for the sake of acting like a human, adds, “And you? I only got one bed so if you’re staying the night it's either squeezed onto a queen, the floor, or right here next to the goats.”

She shrugs with just her right shoulder. “It’s not like I’ve never done all of those before.” She lets her eyes trail up and down his crouched form, and there’s intensity in her gaze that leaves a pit of warmth in his stomach. He clears his throat as she says, “I seem to recall you didn’t mind it so much.”

His jaw clenches involuntarily. There was Dottie, first, the first woman they _assigned_ him, but she’d been older then, too old for them once they figured out getting more super-soldiers wasn’t going to work the traditional way. Then, the girls, the little spiders all in a row, injected with his blood. It made them stronger, faster, but not strong or fast enough. They aged, too, if slowly.

He knows Natalia is older than she claims.

Finally, Howard’s car and the tubes of liquid that created _them_ , and Bucky remembers hoping that meant it was _the end_ , because the old man had called him Sergeant Barnes and he thought that was strange but couldn’t express it to his handlers.

That was three years after Brooklyn, the tenement turned into a living monument to the past, and _her._

“Might be more difficult with Steve,” he points out. “He’s an octopus.”

“I know,” she says with a soft smile. The implication sits low in Bucky’s stomach, but he pushes it away. The hut is quiet behind them, as if Steve’s disappeared, a ghost in the night: gone, gone, gone. 

She finally moves, until she’s right in front of him. It’s the closest he’s been to her without fighting since the day they were torn apart. There’s sadness in her gaze, guilt and a hundred more haunting emotions that he wishes he didn’t have to see, because he’s got too many of his own to deal with Steve’s and hers alongside it.

But Natalia’s never been as good at letting things go as she thinks. “What was it like?” she asks, and it's a natural question. To those left behind, they’d died, and doesn’t everyone want to know what death is like? White light and all that crap people say, the rare few that come back, or is it nothingness like the others claim?

He clears his throat, again, and bites his lip. “Certainly not _Olam HaBa_ ,” he tells her, looks away, and then shrugs. “I don’t want to talk about it. Ask the bird.”

Sam had immediately gone to the palace to call his family. Stark, too, or maybe he’d flown off already. Bucky didn’t feel the least bit bad for hoping that was so, because while he understood Stark attacking _him_ , it was attacking Steve he wouldn’t forgive.

His tone makes it clear to her he’ll say no more, until it doesn't. This entire night has been a clusterfuck, so far, so when he suddenly blurts out _his feelings_ to Natalia as if she’s Shuri and still probing for memories buried underneath that vitriolic garbage in his brain, it's not even that much of a surprise.

“I thought he’d be happy,” Bucky confesses. “Guy goes against over one-hundred countries to prove I’m not a murderer and what? Sees me go poof and thinks, ‘yeah, I’m not dealing with that type of crazy no more?’ Real charming.”

Natasha raises her hand, and Bucky doesn’t even have a moment to register it before his metal arm _—_ the new one _—_ comes up to stop it before it makes contact, with surprising gentleness, against his cheek. Her thumb strokes his cheekbone, goes through the growth on his face he can’t quite bring himself to shave off because HYDRA kept him as bare as a newborn babe (even though he _knows_ he used to, too), and then grasps his chin gently the way she would before she’d kiss him.

“Give him time,” she says so softly she might as well not have spoken at all. It takes him another moment to realize she’s not speaking in English. Hasn’t been this entire time.

Inwardly, he curses HYDRA again, just because, and says, voice choked, “He hasn’t had seventy years of that?”

His mother once joked that time was like a carton of eggs, you never knew when you were going to find nothing but broken shells. At nine-years-old, Bucky didn’t have the slightest clue what she meant by that load of malarkey, and his mother could be as witty as the next woman, but she was _strange_ , but as an adult, he thinks he gets it. His decades have certainly been torn to pieces enough, and there’s nothing he can do to put it back together. Remembers when he first woke up from cryo with Shuri’s grinning face and clipboard and couldn’t fathom contacting Steve. The hours he spent piecing himself back into flesh-and-bone from clay and didn’t want Steve to know that nothing he did was going to make him the same _Bucky Barnes_ he lost.

He thought that had changed, but maybe he’d been fooling himself. Maybe Steve had finally realized it, too. He supposed the blonde, with his back turned and his silence, is one-hundred percent cognizant that he remained in love with a memory.

The wind drifts past them, blowing strands of his hair out of the bun holding it back from her face. He watches as her red curls lift and wave, gently, and the goats _bah bah bah_ at them, food trowels empty and seeking attention. His hand comes down to rest on top of Punk’s, and the goat eats it up the moment by slobbering against his palm.

“He thought he lost you again,” she reminds him. "Didn’t think there was a way to get you back. It devastated him.”

Tears pricking hot at the corner of his eyes, Bucky shakes away from her grip. “I’m right here.” Frowning, he looks back to the hut. The door remains open. Steve hasn’t left, Bucky tells himself, because he’d hear it. He can pick up the sound of those footsteps in New York from Jerusalem, knows the way their weight dug the earth, aware of the time it takes for Steve to just be _here_.

With him. Hell, with them. All of them, Punk and Ari and Benji and _Natalia_.

Undeterred, she steps forward, not like one would approaching a skittish cat, but as if he’s the friendly neighborhood Labrador that plays in the flowers at Central Park. He feels like he can’t breathe, as if his lungs are collapsing into a straightjacket, constricting him, as her arms come around his waist. She _hugs_ him, and it's not the first time since HYDRA he’s been hugged because Shuri is as tactile as Mimi used to be, but it’s the first time it’s felt like condemnation and forgiveness all at once.

He doesn’t realize he’s sobbing until the tears flood under his cheeks, a small river puddle between his flesh and the fabric against her shoulder. Doesn’t realize he’s speaking until he hears, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, Steve, forgive me, it was so fucking dark, Natakha, and cold, a place where no one should ever go, and fuck _—_ ” He breathes out hard, ribs rattling and she’s holding up his shaking body as if he doesn’t have one-hundred pounds of pure muscle and metal on her. “ _—_ I’m sorry _—_ ”

He hears her say, “It’s alright, Yasha. _Shhh_ , _kotoyok_ ,” but it’s as distant as the sound of the sea.

He doesn’t know what else he says. When he stops, they’re on the ground, light drops of rain falling from the sky, mixing with his tears and falling onto her dry face, and there’s dirt on his sweatpants, and the goats have abandoned them to crouch into a pile of sleep in the corner.

And they’re alone.

She’s got her hand running through his grimy hair, strands a mess, and she’s mummering something low that he can’t quite make-out. A few words drift into his tired, fucked-up psyche, and he thinks he picks out “deathless” but nothing is _deathless_ , except maybe him. Died twice, and it didn’t even take. How’s that for immortality, Achilles? he asks himself.

 His whole body draws itself as tight as a bowstring as he breathes in one more time, and then nothing.

 

 

 

“BUCKY!” he hears, low at first, and then louder as it’s shouted again, and then again, and finally, he snaps awake with a start, body flying off the ground. Natalia’s coat falls off his shoulders into the slightly muddy ground, but she’s nowhere in sight.

 “Steve?” he calls out, loudly.

 “BUCKY!” the other man screams again, hoarse and hollow. It’s a terrified sound. The kind of sound Daniel might have made trapped in the lion’s den because no one can tell Bucky that a man about to be consumed by lions ain’t scared shitless.

The sky is still dark, pitch black even, and in the outskirts away from the light of the city, only Bucky’s enhancements helps him pick out Steve who’s sprinting out of the door, hair every which-a-way, and panting. “Bucky?” the other man asks again, but it’s a whimper this time. It’s broken, and little.

Once, when they were barely more than twelve, Steve caught pneumonia. It had been bad that time, and Bucky’s _bubbe_ wasn’t too sure of the boy’s chances at making it to thirteen. The Irish Catholic ladies that lived in Sarah’s building paraded to her door with casseroles and boiled cabbage, all a titter at the thought of “such a nice young boy, dying”, even though they didn’t give Sarah the time of day in a normal week because she wasn’t like _them_. Bucky had glared at them and slammed the door in the faces, even though the Rogers could have used the casseroles and the bland cabbage, but he’d known in all his childhood wisdom they were just there to rubberneck. Steve hacked and coughed and shook on the rickety bed Sarah and he shared, and Bucky slept on the floor for a week.

This sound reminded him of that.

It lifts him up fully from the ground, and before he knows it he’s crossing the length of the pen, and answering, “Steve, I’m here.”

The blonde appeared not to hear him. His eyes were distant, glassy, and he took shuddering steps around the hut as if being tugged by a tether. He wandered away from the door, towards the back of the hut, calling Bucky’s name again.

Bucky tried again. “Steve?”

As if struck deaf, the other man continued to wind his way away from the hut. Every so often, the soft uttering of Bucky’s name flew past his lips, and Bucky followed, helpless, not sure whether to touch him. It was only when they stumbled into where the trees grew the thickest, where the grass was overgrown and housing an untold number of nasties, and the stream flowing through this part of the land widened to a river, that Bucky sped up.

Steve called out, his foot lifted from the ground, and Bucky wrenched him back, hand strong on his shoulders, pulling them both back. They hit the ground, Bucky’s legs flying outwards, spread-eagled, and Steve fell backwards into him. One arm went around Steve’s waist, the other behind him for balance, so that neither of them hit their head, but Steve’s stubborn noggin connected hard with Bucky’s all the same.

“Steve, wake up,” Bucky whispered in his ear. “It’s me, I’m here.”

Instantly, the body in his arms stopped squirming. Muscles locked, everything frozen and still in time, the only sound the hooting of owls and the flow of the stream. Long, torturous moments flew by, and Bucky waited. He waited like he did every time Steve was sick and dying, waited like he did when he knew the draft orders would come, waited like he did for seventy years when he wasn’t aware he was waiting at all. He waited, and finally, it came.

“You’re not real,” Steve whispered. Bucky’s heart thundered against his chest, and then broke. “I’ve dreamed you. Again. You’re not really here. You can’t be.”

“I am,” Bucky insists, entreating Steve to turn around with the timber of his voice, the way his fists grip his tighter. “I’m real and I’m here.”

Fixated and frozen, Steve doesn’t shake his head. He mutters, and all Bucky hears is Steve say, “you are dust and you will return to dust,” and this is not the time, but Bucky hooks his chin around Steve’s shoulders, making sure his hair brushes Steve’s cheek so that the other man can _feel_ it.

Then, summoning up the same crassness of a twenty-one-year old James Buchanan Barnes, he jokes, “It’s not like you can ever get rid of dust. It’s everywhere.”

Steve laughs, then, but it’s a sound like a grater at the last nubs of the potatoes and onions, right before bits of nails go through the metal. It’s _harsh_ , and as biting as the wind in winter, and his body shakes harder than Bucky’s shook in Natalia’s arms mere hours ago, and his breathing turns into a wheeze. He weeps, not quietly, but wailing, as if lightning turned into thunder and entered human form.

Steve sobs and laughs for so long it's as if he thinks the second he stops Bucky’s going to disappear again, because his head has turned into Bucky’s shoulder, eyes screwed tight, and fist bundled up into the fabric of Bucky’s sweatpants. Bucky whispers nonsense words, rubs his arms across Steve’s stomach, soothes his cries, though every damn inch of him wants to cry, too, again. Tears slip unbidden down his own cheeks regardless, but he ignores them.

“The kids tell me that their Daddy took care of them while Papa was gone,” he whispers, painting a picture of Punk, Ari, and Benji running around the hut and screaming for pancakes while their ever-suffering father just gave it. “There’s a lot of land,” he says when that image only elicits a small sigh. “Open sky, mountain air. It’s different from Brooklyn. Think we can build a _sukkah_? We never had one, did we? I don’t remember one.”

Another sigh, and then a nod. “Yeah, that sounds nice, Buck.” There’s still trembling, the limbs pressed so tightly against Bucky quaking with unbridled emotion, and it’s all he can do to keep talking and hold on for the storm.

“You, me, and the kids. And Natalia. Think she’d come?” Bucky continues. “We can invite bird-brain, if you want. And Shuri. Kid needs to leave that lab once in a while. I suppose His Highness will be too busy, but we’ll send him a picture on a card.”

“Wanda,” Steve adds, the only indication he’s listening to Bucky’s babbling. The only sign that lets him know Steve’s still _here_. Bucky nods, and confirms, adds a little check in the mental box for the brunette with the glowing hands whose lost one hadn’t come back.

His fingertips trace patterns across Steve’s ribs, little star patterns, and he continues, “We’ll do that and sleep out in the open. Moonlight. Just like we talked about, grabbing blankets from the bed and breathing in the night air from the balcony. If it hadn’t been rusted, you know? I always thought that thing was going to collapse out from underneath us.”

“It’s cause you used to try lindy hop moves on it, jerk,” Steve reminds him. There’s less a sob in his voice, more sass, and Bucky smiles.

“That’s right,” he says, even though he doesn’t remember this. “You with me, Stevie?”

“Yeah,” the other man says, harsh breaths soft. “I’m here.” His head is still pressed against Bucky’s shoulder, and he feels like the most solid weight Bucky’s ever held in his life.

Bucky bites his lip, tasting the salt left over from his tears, and the dirt from his sleep. “Then why won’t you look at me?”

A hiss, and then— “Because I’m afraid.” Before Bucky can ask of what, Steve elaborates, and it's like the floodgates have opened. All the bottled-up emotions the stiff silence held back, it all comes crashing out under the moonlight, the soft drip of rain against their skin, what little escapes past the canopy of the trees, and the sound of the stream in the background. “Because the second I look at you, I’ll replay it in my head and not even like a black-and-white. It’s fucking color, Buck. I’ll see you disappear. I’ll see you fall. I’ll see you leave me, and I can’t do it. I’m not that fucking strong. There’s only so many times I can lose you without going mad. If I never look at you, if I never see you, then maybe I’ll never lose you.” 

Bucky grips Steve’s chin, gently, in his metal hand. The coolness of the inhuman material causes the blonde to shudder, then relax, body falling plaint against Bucky’s. “I’m not Eurydice,” he says, finally remembering the myth. “I’m not going to be gone the second you turn around. _Malach ha-Mavet_ hasn’t gotten me yet. You’d win that fight. Probably go for the eyes.”

Achingly, Steve lifts his head. His eyes are still corkscrewed close. Drops of rain cling to his lashes, his cheeks are red from rubbing against Bucky’s shoulder, and his lips are chapped. He looks like hell. All bushman (or lumberjack hipster as Shuri would call it), with the beard and the lack of personal hygiene. Bucky’s never seen him this messed up, and he longs to fix it. “You’re damn right,” Steve finally whispers, and then—

 _Blue_.

Steve’s eyes are as wide as a two-dollar coin, and he’s looking to Bucky as if he’s the only well of water in the desert; as if he’s an oasis for a starving man; as if he’s the thread stitching this super-soldier package together and one tug’s going to break it all apart.

“Hey, punk,” Bucky says. The same words he’s said a million times before.

Steve huffs. “Jerk.” Then, their lips are pressed together, soft and slow, before they pull apart. Their foreheads remain pressed together for a long while, hands moving, and eyes open. When the rain tapers off, Steve finally moves, back up on his feet. His shoulders square out, and then he offers his hand. Bucky grabs hold of it, lifts himself up, but doesn’t unlace their fingers.

The goats are still asleep by the time they get back to the hut. The sun is beginning to peak up from the sky, a brilliant wash of colors that reminds Bucky of the time he and Steve saved up enough coin to get to Manhattan and go to the Met. There’d been hotdogs then, too, beef ones, from a cart with plenty of relish and mustard. Bucky hated them, but he forked over the coins as soon as he saw Steve’s eyes light up.

Natalia is still gone. As quick as she’d come, she’d disappeared, and Bucky doesn’t know whether she’s going to stick around or not. She’s Steve’s something, but maybe there’s too many bad memories and bullet wounds between Bucky and her for them to ever be a something, too. As soon as they get in, Steve tugs them over to his squared pile of books, and they begin to put them back on the table. Bucky’s notebooks go back into a separate pile, and then the Tanakh in the middle, with the Russian, Greek, Yiddish, and English literature in four distinct stacks. Then, Bucky shuffles closer, and tiredly places his head on Steve’s shoulder.

Their bodies are turned towards his small kitchenette. Bucky can almost _feel_ the heat of Steve’s embarrassed blush as he says, “I’ll fix that,” meaning the dent. The rough, thin metal of Bucky’s dog tags hanging around Steve’s neck dig into Bucky’s forehead as he shakes his head.

“Don’t bother,” he says. “It’ll live.” 

 _Like me_ , he thinks, as the two of them go into the bedroom. As Steve finally takes off his uniform, down to nothing but his boxers, and crawls into bed, Bucky takes down the sheet shielding the mirror. He’ll scrub off the wax tomorrow, after he feeds the goats, and he’ll take a long, _hot_ shower. He takes off his shirt, too, and then he’s crawling into bed, curled up next to Steve. The blonde’s face is pressed to the back of Bucky’s neck, his breath warm against his skin, and one strong arm wrapped around his waist. The curtains are open, but both men are too tired to care, and within seconds, they drift off. 

 

 

 

A week later, Natalia’s hair is pulled back in a blue kerchief like one of those posters Bucky’s seen on the internet that features families on a _kibbutz_. She’s all Russian right now, though, barking orders at Bucky, Steve, and Thor with the clear distinction of a woman who knows she’s going to be heeded.

“You’re three of the strongest men on Earth,” she says, her feet propped up against one of the posts of the goat’s pen. She’s wearing heels, Bucky notices again, and still can’t help but ponder how she walked all the way here from the city in those. “You're telling me you can’t build a bigger hut?”

There’s going to be a spare room. A guest room. Because Bucky has those now. All proper and grown up and homeowning like his mama. Thor’s going to be staying in it for now, though Bucky’s still a little wary of the man who wears his grief like a shroud. Dead brother, Steve told him, dead planet, too. More grief. Well, there’s always enough of that to go around. But he’s a stranger, and Bucky’s not too good with that.

 _He’s Steve’s friend_ , Bucky reminds himself. _And this will be for Sam when Thor leaves_.

Wanda’s living in the palace, but Steve makes it clear she’s always welcome. They’d shrugged off the invitation to go back to New York on Stark’s dime because Bucky’s still a war criminal and that’s not going to change until Ross and his ilk are gone. And, truthfully, neither wants to leave their little goat farm to return to the hustle and bustle of the ‘City That Never Sleeps.’

“When’s Sam coming with the new bed?” Steve asks as he brings more wood over to them. “Or am I going to be squished against the wall tonight?”

Bucky grumbles, muttering, “At least you’re not the one in the middle. You two are fucking furnaces.” Louder, he calls back to Natalia, “You can always help!”

She smirks back wickedly. “Could but won’t.”

Thor laughs and begins to assemble the wood to be nailed. “We do not need her help, James. We will accomplish this task on our own.”

Punk bleats, and trots around the pen, nipping playfully at the wood, while Ari attempts to make a snack of Natalia’s heel. She glares, and tries to shake him off, but the goat persists. Benji, the lazy fuck, is sleeping.

“Am I running a bed-and-breakfast here? I thought everyone was going to work,” Bucky grumbles, but he’s not truly irritated. Steve’s biceps flex as he chops more wood, distracting Bucky from his own tasks, and the sun is shining. There’s no sign of weapons of war, no sign of ugly faced douchebags that want to cleave the world in two, and more important, no sign of anything remotely resembling alien spacedogs.

The war can wait, because Rogers and Barnes have three more hours of daylight to fix a guest room to fit into a hut on a goat farm in Wakanda.

Straining to reach the god’s height, he holds the boards in place. The sound of the hammer and nails mix with the whine of Natalia complaining about her shoes, Steve’s sassy one-liners, and Thor’s grunts, and Bucky has one more thought.

 _I can get used to this_. 


End file.
